Its audience is anyone who is interested, but with a focus on members of Congress
and their staffs, personnel of regulatory and executive branch agencies, state
legislators and their staffs, and the trade press.

Its mechanisms will be:

Site Visits. The military has a tradition called "the Staff Ride,"
which
is a tour of an actual battlefield conducted by an expert who discuses the facts
on the ground, the information available to the commanders, and the choices available
and made.
The battlefields of the high-tech age are data centers,
communications hubs,
research labs, energy facilities, fab plants,
and innovation clusters, often
of awesome size and complexity.
There is no substitute for actually seeing such
facilities and
learning how they work. TEI will conduct a series of short but
intensive tours of such facilities, usually in small groups of six
to 12 at a
time, starting with those within reach of D.C.

Expert Seminarsand One-on-One Briefings;
Washington
has
too many panel discussions at which contending interests
each
get
10 minutes to shout their talking points. TEI will conduct seminars
for staff and Members at which one or two
experts will take as long as
necessary to discuss a key topic with
the audience, in thoughtful but practical
terms.

Conferences. TEI will sponsor high-level conferences that
are
focused on how to get things done rather than on endless debate.
For example,
its first conference will be on electromagnetic spectrum. There is universal
agreement that more spectrum must be made available to commercial enterprises;
the question on the table is
how to build a robust secondary market for spectrum.

Papers. TEI will produce background papers, selectively.
These
will be pithy works addressed to the audiences described above –
people
who already know something about an issue, but need
additional information or
would profit from a new point of view that
is receiving insufficient attention.
The objective is to be useful to congressional staffers and trade press by helping
them better do
their jobs.

TEI will be an autonomous project within CLI. Its President, Founder & Director
is Garland T. McCoy, Jr., the former Senior VP
of the Progress and Freedom Foundation and former Founder and Chief Development
Officer of the Technology Policy Institute. Its Vice President will be James
V. DeLong, who is VP & Senior Analyst of CLI.

TEI will operate within the confines of CLI’s 501(c)(3) status as a non-profit
corporation. This status is deliberately chosen to emphasize that TEI’s function
is education, not lobbying, and that it is not a channel for anyone’s talking
points.

The Convergence Law Institute (CLI) is a non-profit organization dedicated
to research and education on public policy issues.
[more... ]

SINGAPORE FOUNTAIN OF WEALTH"This is the largest fountain in the world. . . . Water is known as the symbol of life and wealth in Chinese culture, and the inward motion of the water . . . represents riches pouring in."
By markehr. Licensed under Creative
Commons.